BS Summary: This article contains 6 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Framing Effect, and Unattributed Quote, with Anchoring Bias as the most egregious example at 25.1% saturation with 44 hits. Analysis detected 129 faulty-reasoning hits from 175 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 50.5% and a BS Rank of 51% (8,338 of 16,813 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 50.40% of the article peer group.
The journalist McKay Coppins wasn’t a gambling man.
But when his employer The Atlantic staked him $10,000 to bet on the 2025 NFL season, he couldn’t say no.
Step one was getting permission from his bishop.
Coppins is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which prohibits gambling.
But since it wasn’t his money and it was for work, he got the go-ahead.
And so began what Coppins calls his year as a degenerate gambler — because it wasn’t long before he started feeling, well, kind of addicted.
He’s joining us to talk about sports betting, how it changed him, and how it came to be that last year alone Americans bet $160 billion on touchdowns scored, yards gained, buckets made and pretty much any other outcome you could imagine in sports.
GUEST –
McKay Coppins | Staff writer at The Atlantic and co-host of the podcast Deseret Voices.
His story is called “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler.”
Airdate: Mar.
18, 2026
Analysis
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